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Dr. Michael Pignone to Lead Duke CACHE

Dr. Michael Pignone to Lead Duke CACHE

Portrait photograph of Michael Pignone, MD, Duke CACHE Director
Michael Pignone, MD, MPH

Duke AI Health welcomes Michael Pignone, MD, MPH, as he takes the helm of the Duke Collaborative to Advance Health Equity (CACHE) effective October 15, 2024. Currently the Rebecca and John Kirkland Distinguished Professor of Medicine and vice chair of Quality and Innovation in the Duke Department of Medicine, Dr. Pignone also serves as the faculty director for Primary Care Transformation and Innovation within the Margolis Center for Health Policy and the Director for Cancer Screening Equity at the Duke Cancer Institute.

“I am delighted to see Dr. Pignone move into this role,” says Richard Shannon, MD, founding director of CACHE and Chief Quality Officer & Chief Medical Officer for Duke Health. “The energy he brings to this work and the breadth of his experience, spanning clinical care, research, policy, and population health, make him an ideal choice to build upon our early successes with this initiative and grow the community partnerships vital to our work.”

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Duke Electronic Health Records Study Design Workshop (EHR-SDW) 2024

Electronic poster for the Duke Electronic Health Records Study Design Workshop taking place December 2-6, 2024. Detailed information on the poster is contained in the body of the webpage.

Duke AI Health is pleased to announce the Duke Electronic Health Records Study Design Workshop (EHR-SDW) 2024. The workshop will be offered in December as a virtual five-day class that provides foundational lectures and hands-on studios on the fundamentals of working with and designing EHR-based studies.

The EHR-SDW is targeted toward individuals interested in learning about how to work with and conduct studies using edata from electronic health records (EHRs). EHR data are a widely available form of real-world data that are being used in different types of studies, spanning clinical trials, comparative effectiveness, risk prediction, population health, and more. The EHR-SDW will introduce learners to the components of EHR data and in considerations for designing effective studies. In addition to didactic lectures, participants will get hands-on experience in working with publicly available tools to facilitate EHR studies (e.g., RxNorm, CCS codes, geocoding), as well as feedback on effective study designs.

This course will be conducted virtually via Zoom.

To register for the EHR-SDW, please visit  https://events.duke.edu/ehr-sdw-2024

To request consideration for a scholarship, please visit https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a3Fs9TyyK82Bkr4

The deadline for registration is Thursday, November 21, 2024.

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Spark Initiative for AI in Medical Imaging Officially Launches at Duke

The Duke Spark Initiative for AI in Medical Imaging formally launches this week. Spark’s mission at Duke encompasses research into development and use of artificial intelligence in medical imaging, with an emphasis on collaborative work between physicians across different specialties and machine learning experts.

Portrait of Duke SPARK Director Maciej Mazurowski, PhD

“Spark represents the kind of collaboration that can realize the full potential of the diverse pool of knowledge, talent, and insight across the School of Medicine and the larger university community,” says Mary Klotman, MD, executive vice president for health affairs at Duke University and the dean of the Duke University School of Medicine. “As AI technologies are increasingly integrated into patient care and research, efforts like Duke Spark will be essential for ensuring that these tools yield meaningful benefits for patients and clinicians.”

An interdepartmental effort convened under the umbrella of Duke AI Health, Spark includes a team of faculty researchers and exceptional trainees drawn from the Departments of Radiology, Surgery, Orthopaedic Surgery, Medicine, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering.

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Duke Researchers Receive NIH Grant to Use EHR Data to Explore Late Talking in Children

Portraits of Benjamin Goldstein, PhD (left) and Lauren Franz, MBChB (right)

Duke AI Health Director of Data Science Benjamin Goldstein, PhD, and Interim Director for Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development Lauren Franz, MBChB, have recently been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop approaches for using existing sources of health data to better understand late language emergence in children, or “late talking.” Late talking often co-occurs with autism and is frequently “undercoded” in medical records, which can affect whether children and families receive referrals for early intervention. The R21 grant, which is part of the NIH’s cross-institute Tackling Acquisition of Language in Kids (TALK) Initiative, will support efforts at Duke to apply machine learning to compare coding data in electronic health records (EHRs) with free-text information in EHR notes to determine whether indications of late talking recorded there are matched by appropriate coding.

The work will also leverage longitudinal health data and NC-statewide sources of claims data to shed additional light on developmental pathways, including methods for analyzing co-occurring factors that may predispose children to late talking, as well as downstream effects of delayed language acquisition later in life. Another focus for the project will be the health equity dimensions of late talking, including differences across gender, language, and race and ethnicity.

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Duke AI Health Welcomes Michael Zavlanos as Director in Healthcare System Optimization

Picture of Michael Zavlanos, PhD and the text "“We are very excited about the unique insights Dr. Zavlanos will bring to challenges that directly affect the performance of our health system and the experiences of our patients and the clinicians and staff who care for them.” – Duke AI Health Director Michael Pencina, PhD"

Duke AI Health has recently welcomed Michael Zavlanos, PhD, as Director in Healthcare System Optimization for Duke AI Health. In this newly created role, Dr. Zavlanos will direct efforts focused on developing and implementing machine learning, optimization, and other algorithmic tools to increase operational efficiency and resource use in health care at Duke.

Currently a professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Robotics, Dr. Zavlanos received his doctorate in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in robotics and autonomous control systems. More recently, at Duke, Dr. Zavlanos has begun to explore the potential for using data gathered from “real-world” clinical settings to solve problems with a direct impact for patients.

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Ricardo Henao Rejoins Duke in New Role as DCRI Associate Director of Clinical Trials AI

Duke Clinical Research Institute and AI Health are delighted to announce the return of Dr. Ricardo Henao to Duke, starting July 1! After a leave of absence at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, Dr. Henao has returned to North Carolina as Associate Director of Clinical Trials AI for the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and as a member of AI Health’s Faculty Council. Dr. Henao is Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University School of Medicine.

“We are very excited about Dr. Henao’s return to Duke given his enormous contributions both to teaching and to developing novel methods for applying probabilistic modeling to deep learning algorithms,” notes Duke AI Health Director Michael Pencina, PhD. “Ricardo’s innovative work has been key to multidisciplinary efforts at Duke and beyond to improve predictive modeling for clinical outcomes,” he continues, noting that Henao’s gifts as a collaborator, methodologist, and teacher will be in high demand.

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AI Health Welcomes Dr. Monica Agrawal as New Faculty Affiliate

Portrait of Monica Agrawal, PhD, and the quoted text: "“We’re tremendously excited to welcome Monica to Duke. Not only does she bring an outstanding academic track record, but also a wealth of real-world experience that’s directly relevant to some of the most pressing problems we’re working to solve in the world of health AI.” David Page, PhD Chair, Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatic"

Please join us in welcoming Monica Agrawal, PhD, to Duke AI Health! Dr. Agrawal, who has a joint appointment through the Duke School of Medicine’s Duke Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and the Department of Computer Science, will also be joining Duke AI Health as a Faculty Affiliate, where she will work on AI applications that facilitate clinical decision support and improve accessibility for patients.

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Vanderbilt and Duke Awarded Moore Foundation Grant to Improve Oversight of AI Technology in Health Care Systems

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Duke University School of Medicine were awarded a $1.25 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for the project “Measuring Artificial Intelligence (AI) Maturity in Healthcare Organizations.”  Working with the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) and the University of Iowa, a team of experts will leverage the grant to develop a maturity model framework. The project leads are Peter Embí, MD, MS, and Laurie Novak, PhD, MHSA, from VUMC; and Michael Pencina, PhD, and Nicoleta Economou, PhD, from Duke. This framework will outline the essential capabilities that health systems must establish to ensure they are well-prepared for the trustworthy utilization of AI models.

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Duke AI Health welcomes Ozanan R. Meireles, MD

The Duke Department of Surgery is pleased to announce the appointment of Ozanan R. Meireles, MD, as the department’s first Vice Chair for Innovation, effective Jan. 2, 2024.

Dr. Meireles is an internationally known authority in surgical applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and comes to us from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) where he specializes in minimally invasive surgery and runs the MGH Surgical AI and Innovation Lab (SAIIL). This lab boasts an impressive and longstanding close collaboration of more than eight years with MIT’s renowned Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (MIT-CSAIL), a partnership cultivated under the guidance of Professor Daniela Rus. Subsequently, he is bringing SAIIL to Duke as director of the lab. He will work within the School of Medicine as Surgical Director of Duke AI Health and advise on surgical AI applications emerging in the Health System. He will also serve as Vice Chair of Innovation for the Department of Surgery.

“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Meireles to Duke, where the intersection of medicine and data science serves as the cornerstone for innovation in health research and healthcare delivery,” says Michael Pencina, PhD, Chief Data Scientist for Duke Health, and Director of Duke AI Health. “His expertise in AI will play a vital role in advancing our data-driven collaborative initiatives, and we look forward to the groundbreaking discoveries and advancements that will result from his contributions.”

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Duke AI Health’s Nicoleta Economou talks guidelines & guardrails for responsible health AI development in AIMed “Champions” interview

Nicoleta Economou-Zavlanos, PhD, the director of Governance and Evaluation of health AI systems at Duke AI Health, was recently interviewed by AIMed’s Gemma Lovegrove for their AI Champions Interview Series, which highlights key thought leaders in the AI space. During the interview, Dr. Economou underscored the importance of incorporating fairness, transparency, and inclusivity throughout the entire process of health AI development, implementation, and monitoring.

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